Stunning FaceBook 3% More Web Visits and 5x More Pageviews Than Google

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Mashable:

According to data from analysis and intelligence firm Hitwise, Facebook’s year-over-year growth has been phenomenal. We reported in June that the social network was set to eclipse Google in web traffic; now, Hitwise is showing that in the past week, Facebook.com saw 3% more web visits and almost five times more pageviews than Google.com.

By these metrics, Facebook is by far the single most popular website in the United States. Still, other sources with other measurements and criteria show some variance.

The company has been growing at a breakneck pace all year. It announced that its network had reached the extraordinary milestone of 500 million members in July. And at Web. 2.0 Summit this week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the audience that half of those members visit Facebook on a daily basis.

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Teach me at statistical terminology: does "25% of pageviews" mean that, of every 4 times somebody (anyone, anywhere) gets online and visits a website (any website whatsoever), one of those four is FB? This sounds utterly unbelievable to me.

Administrator from US

In March, we reported an important milestone when the market share of visits to Facebook.com* surpassed Google.com*. Since then, we have continued to watch the growth of Facebook.com, which increased 60% from the same week last year and represented 1 in 10 US Internet visits last week.

The amount of content consumption taking place on the popular social network has also grown substantially where nearly 1 in 4 page views in the US took place on Facebook.com for the week ending November 13, 2010. The market share of page views for Facebook.com was 24.27% last week, 3.8x the volume of the 2nd ranked website YouTube.com with 6.93%.

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Teach me at statistical terminology: does "25% of pageviews" mean that, of every 4 times somebody (anyone, anywhere) gets online and visits a website (any website whatsoever), one of those four is FB? This sounds utterly unbelievable to me.

You have to separate "pageviews" from "visits". Every time someone clicks "refresh" in their browser, it's a pageview. I know a lot of people who leave a tab permanently open to facebook, and pop over to it every 10 or 15 minutes and click refresh to see if there's any updates.

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...boring and pubescent...

Which is different from the vast majority of humanity how? (kidding... sorta)

From an advertiser's standpoint, it's a mixed bag. All those eyeballs, but trained to look at that single column of updates. Good advertising on FB can be free - create a brand page and let your most avid fans/buyers do all the proselytizing for you. Or you can pay for ad space in the right hand column, and wonder if people even notice it out of the corner of their eye.

Google is starting to pay more attention to this and realize that Microsoft isn't the competition, it's FB.

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When I used to have a FB account I would do the same thing, just sit there with it open in the background and refresh it throughout the day. The ad effectiveness of such pageviews is of course minimal, but they kept me there all day long!

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It's the AOL of today, a walled garden catering especially for those who get confused by the internet.

Although I get a small percentage of my traffic referrals from Facebook, those users have a higher bounce rate and shorter visit than any other visitors.

In other words they are visitors not worth chasing as they have such short attention spans - or they simply don't understand what to do next when they reach a web site out in the big scary world beyond Facebook!

To a certain extent, putting those sorts of users in their own playpen is good for the rest of the internet.

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Its interesting from an advertising perspective. Ive run socalled targetted ads on FB and the ROI on my investment is 0%.

Thats right - multiple products and low end / high end tried - I lost 100% of my spend - Zero Sales and Zero revisits. I get good sales on the sites I advertised through natural serp listings though.

Now thats not to say others have also had the same - but irrespective of volume of visits and pageviews being impressive - I still perceive the ROI on ad spend would be atrocious.

I want to go back to the days many will remember where we all stuck banners everywhere, eventually that model just died (well - it didnt die but it flopped massively).

The thing about FB ads is they are (to me anyway) nothing more than expensive small banner ads.

Whats better? I dont know - I dont do Adwords PPC anymore either due to margins being too close to the bone for me to be bothered with but I may try some more soon. I cant see myself going back to FB though - it really was bad.

With such massive numbers of pageviews - surely it would be far better for FB if they charged say .0000001 cent a click. (Well you know what I mean - a tiny amount) to get the hoards of advertisers in. But at their current rates and with such dross quality traffic I really cant see how people would stick with them as an advertising platform.

I long for the day when FB comes to me and says - "Hey Mr Advertiser - give me 50% of your Net Profit and you can have all the clicks you like".

Now that would be a revolution in mass advertising - will it happen? would others want that? I dont know. Just thinkin out loud.

Performance based advertising is the next big thing - but it needs a big hitting site - like FB.

Let me think.

Affiliate model - I the affiliate get paid by merchant a % when I sell his stuff. Current Ad Model - I pay ad network (goofle say) and get shafted due to silly high costs. New ad model - I pay ad network when I make a sale.

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FB ads really aren't made for tangible products. If you need to generate leads/sign up, or get people to play or install a game, it could work well. Getting users on FB to pay for something is like pulling teeth.

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I absolutely believe these numbers. I know people that are completely hooked on facebook. To them, it's almost like their entire purpose on earth hinges on the activity of their facebook account.

I don't have an account myself, but I should probably check it out.

I've been completely turned off by my 40-something divorced sister-in-law that acts like she's in high school, and spends most of her day checking her facebook account. It's like everyone wants a second chance at being in the popular crowd in high school.

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Getting users on FB to pay for something is like pulling teeth.

I also believe this to be true. I've spent a lot of money (my money) advertising and I know the difference between junk traffic and Google's traffic. I could care less if FB's traffic is 1,000 times Google's. Junk is junk. Volume is meaningless. Fortunately for FB, there are investors that have no idea how to advertise on the web and they think volume is meaningful. I'm sorry, but it's not...

I'm eager to see what will happen to FB two years from now - when the ROI on everyone's marketing campaign is near zero.

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I'm eager to see what will happen to FB two years from now - when the ROI on everyone's marketing campaign is near zero.

Unfortunately, the brand marketers probably aren't really measuring their ROI. They just throw their money at the hottest new marketing channel(which happens to be FB right now) and they will manage to come up with some creative ways to justify that marketing spend to their bosses.

Those stats (and I have no doubt they are at least ballpark accurate) are a great way to build hype and get people to throw investment money at Facebook but by that logic those same investors should start buying up all the wall and floor space in company break rooms and near water coolers for $1000 per square foot with the anticipation that advertisers are going to start spending billions to reach people in these places.

They'll come up with a cost per turn in a conversation, per head nod, hand shake, per chuckle, per mouthful of food or sip of water, per picture shown from a vacation. Unless brand advertisers can come up with a metric or use an existing one (CPM) to justify lofty ad spends, all the activity in the world on FB isn't worth much. That, of course is not out of the question by any stretch of the imagination. When something completely flops in advertising you just come up with a new metric to show that it "works".

Behavioral targeting of banners is one such instance of that. Only show ads to people who have already been to a site (and are therefore more likely to buy anyway) and attribute the sales generated from people who have been exposed to an ad (even if it was at the bottom of the page and the browser may have "seen" the cookie but the person never saw the ad) and all of a sudden you have a meaningless measurement that says you should dump all of your ad dollars into banner advertising! You can fool even the most seasoned "financially smart" CMO when you play with the metrics and measurements!

If all these FB pages views were worth something, then forums would be the most valuable properties on the web and be going public at billion dollar valuations.